By Laine Penney
Jeff Bezos, well-known billionaire and former CEO of Amazon, is returning as a co-CEO for a new AI startup called Project Prometheus. This marks the first time he has stepped back into an operational role ever since he left Amazon in 2021. The startup has already raised $6.2 billion dollars in funding , and nearly 100 employees have already been hired, including engineers from OpenAI, Meta AI, and Deepmind.
Project Prometheus gets its title from the Greek god of the same name, who stole fire from the gods and offered it to humanity, which is a metaphor that reflects new leaps and innovations in technology. The startup plans to develop AI technology and systems that “improve and accelerate manufacturing and engineering processes across sectors including computing hardware, automotive, and aerospace,” according to tech analysts at TechStock2. They want to take a unique approach, where they seek for the AI to learn from real-world physical experimentation, which may revolutionize the AI world.
Jeff Bezos is partnering with Vikram “Vik” Bajaj, a physicist and chemist with a strong background in leading projects surrounding AI in medical research, such as directing many projects for Foresite Capital, as well as founding Verily in 2015, a health-tech company that spun from Google X. Both Bajaj and Bezos will be working together as CEOs for this project. According to Startupro business advisors, Bajaj “brings deep expertise in moonshot innovation and emerging tech.”
Jeff Bezos himself has a large background in engineering, being closely involved with SpaceX rival BlueOrigin as its founder, as well as having backed many AI projects such as Figure AI and Perplexity AI, additionally funding Toloka with Bezos Expeditions, his investment firm. Developing new and efficient technology with Project Prometheus may accelerate his ambitions further, especially regarding BlueOrigin and his milestones.
How is Project Prometheus expected to compete with other AI platforms? The ever-growing AI world is getting more and more expensive, so the startup’s funding gives it a large advantage. Furthermore, Project Prometheus seeks to create AI that interacts with the physical world rather than create chatbots or cloud providers, all backed by a frontier-model lab, which gives it a large technological advantage.
Neither Jeff Bezos nor Vik Bajaj have made any public announcements regarding Project Prometheus. But what did Elon Musk say to reports on X? He called them a copycat, cat emoji included.
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